Both types of announcement matter. Some people make their decision to attend based on the first one, general and vague (NA, people that will go no matter what), while others do it after there are more details of the event, with prizes or what can be called a proper announcement (EU, people that require scheduling in advance).

Quakecon has always been negligent on both: first should be several months before the event and second at least two months before.

I understand syncerror doesn't have full control of the situation, both of id and of sponsors, but still looks very unprofessional from the outside. This is especially true considering they make the same mistake every single year, same with very poor coverage (except the one with 2gd in it) and overall poor tournament organization skills..

snifff. working on it. snifff. I will announce current status in true quakecon fashion 2 minutes before the tournament snifff. enough time right? the biggest problem though is finding a shirt that's loud enough. snifff

In quakecon there are 'pro' and 'open' tournaments. Just like dreamhack, the "invites" system isn't much of an invitational because it's a public application then players are selected out of that list.

In reality though most get accepted and lets face it, 99.9% of quake players don't have a place in the pro tournaments.

I'm aware of the 'open' tournaments that they previously had, but it's still sad to see invite tournaments STILL existing in an already small community. LAN or not, invite only alienates people who would love to play in it but can't because they don't make the list.

It started when QL got popular and it didn't stop. Dreamhack, Qcon, all of them ran invite-only tournaments all the time. It was frustrating as a player because I wanted to go but couldn't. I saw maybe one invite only tournament in Quake 3 and 4. Half the reason I got involved was because it was open to anyone, and if you wanted to fly out and play you could. Getting denied because you're not top 16 over and over gets a little old.

There was never a need for invite only tournaments, so why they are so popular in a dying community is beyond me. I expect that kind of tournament structure for SC or LoL because there's shitloads of teams and players, there's plenty of viewers who would enjoy an invite only top 16 tournament. This game gets TWO lan tournaments a year, and right now BOTH are saying "fuck you" to duelers that want to play. I might be harsh with that, but it's just what I've seen over the past three to four years. The only reason it's not a big deal for this event is because there isn't a lot of people going to the tournament. Regardless, it's just not necessary.

Other games aren't as open as you are describing them to be. Have you seen a bronze medal team in DH LoL? Same applies to quake, counterstrike, starcraft and so on.

These are tournaments in which the best in the world participate. 1200 elo hitsu does not have a place there because it drops the quality of games and fills a spot that a better player could have used (16 max. players, hitsu takes cooller's spot).

Still, as you say there aren't many sign ups nowadays, which means there are much better chances for getting picked ("invited") if you apply.
There's a problem with that though, because from the info we have it's very safe to say the public sign ups list doesn't matter at all. I'd say at least 90% of the spots are already taken, with the names from the two pre-quakecon cups (NA and EU).

There's plenty of LANs though for a LoL team to go to, same with SC players. Even when QL was in its prime there were only a handful of LANs to go to, some open, but a lot were invite only. IEM you had to qualify online, DH was almost always invite only, and now two qcons. My point is that if a game has a massive community, lots of events, and tons of top level talent, then sure throw some invite only events. But when a game doesn't have all that, it seems a bit ridiculous to run invite-only tournaments. There's people who want to go to events like that who aren't top 16 and can't simply because they're not top 16. At least IEMs structure was understandable (online tournament until top 16 or 8, then LAN). The rest were just unnecessary and unwelcoming to other competitive players.

Has any worth mentioning player been not selected to participate in a major QL lan? I don't think so.

Also you have to consider there are finite resources (16 PCs), that organizing a 64 players lan is way more difficult than 32 and that it's not that great of a spectacle to see 40-0 matches on lan. That's why a selection has to be done.